Comparative Decision-Making Analysis
Published on 21. March 2013
Book
Hardback
512 pages
978-0-19-985680-0 (ISBN)
Description
Decision making cuts across most areas of intellectual enquiry and academic endeavor. The classical view of individual human thinkers choosing among options remains important and instructive, but the contributors to this volume broaden this perspective to characterize the decision making behavior of groups, non-human organisms and even non-living objects and mathematical constructs. A diverse array of methods is brought to bear-mathematical, computational, subjective, neurobiological, evolutionary, and cultural. We can often identify best or optimal decisions and decision making processes, but observed responses may deviate markedly from these, to a large extent because the environment in which decisions must be made is constantly changing. Moreover, decision making can be highly constrained by institutions, natural and social context, and capabilities. Studies of the mechanisms underlying decisions by humans and other organisms are just beginning to gain traction and shape our thinking. Though decision making has fundamental similarities across the diverse array of entities considered to be making them, there are large differences of degree (if not kind) that relate to the question of human uniqueness. From this survey of views and approaches, we converge on a tentative agenda for accelerating development of a new field that includes advancing the dialog between the sciences and the humanities, developing a defensible classification scheme for decision making and decision makers, addressing the role of morality and justice, and moving advances into applications-the rapidly developing field of decision support.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Students in cognitive science, psychology, ecology, business, philosophy, anthropology, and political science courses
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 33 mm
Weight
945 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-985680-0 (9780199856800)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Thomas Zentall is a comparative cognitive psychologist who studies the similarities and differences between the behavior of humans and other animals; both the cognitive behavior of other animals and the noncognitive behavior of humans. For example, social learning, concept learning, memory strategies, suboptimal gambling behavior, and the effect of effort on the value of the reward that follows.
Philip Crowley is an evolutionary ecologist who uses both theoretical and empirical methods to address a wide array of issues in natural systems. He is Professor of Biology at the University of Kentucky, where he has taught and conducted research since 1976. Professor Crowley has served as Director of Graduate Studies in Biology and as Director of the School of Biological Sciences; he received the university's William B. Sturgill Award for contributions to graduate education in 2012. In 1991-92 he was a Royal Society Scholar at the British NERC Centre for Population Biology in England and will be a INRA Scholar in Sophia Antipolis, France, in 2013.
Philip Crowley is an evolutionary ecologist who uses both theoretical and empirical methods to address a wide array of issues in natural systems. He is Professor of Biology at the University of Kentucky, where he has taught and conducted research since 1976. Professor Crowley has served as Director of Graduate Studies in Biology and as Director of the School of Biological Sciences; he received the university's William B. Sturgill Award for contributions to graduate education in 2012. In 1991-92 he was a Royal Society Scholar at the British NERC Centre for Population Biology in England and will be a INRA Scholar in Sophia Antipolis, France, in 2013.
Content
Table of Contents ; Chapter 1. Introduction ; Philip H. Crowley and Thomas R. Zentall ; Chapter 2. Economic decisions and institutional boundaries ; Evelyn Korn and Johannes Ziesecke ; Commentary 2.1. Advocating for Homo economicus ; Erwin Amann ; Commentary 2.2. The Neoclassical Economics Model: Extensions and Limits ; Jack Schieffer ; Chapter 3. Why Making a Decision Involves More Than Decision-Making: Past, Present, and Future in Human Action ; Bertram C. Bruce ; Commentary 3.1. Punctuation, Continuity, and Historicity: Traversing the In-Between ; Travis Whetsell and Patricia M. Shields ; Commentary 3.2. Why we will never know if human decision making is unique ; Evelyn Korn ; Commentary 3.3. Forks in the Road from Decision to Action ; Chris Higgins ; Chapter 4. Environmental Decision Making in the Argentine Delta ; Stephanie C. Kane ; Commentary 4.1. Environmental Decision-Making, ; Social Reality, and Port Cities as <"Hot Spots>" ; Commentary 4.2. The Crevices of Unreason in Human Decision Making ; Bertram C. Bruce ; Chapter 5. The Social Nature of Human Decision Making ; James D. Morrow ; Commentary 5.1. The Social Nature of Human Decision Making: A Computational Perspective ; Craig Boutilier ; Commentary 5.2. When Should We Expect a Nash Equilibrium? ; Barry O'Neill ; Chapter 6: Ambiguous decisions in the human brain ; Ifat Levy ; Commentary 6.1 Ambiguous Decisions in the Human Brain ; Ming Hsu and Lusha Zhu ; Commentary 6.2 What Animals Can Tell Us About Human Choice Under Risk ; Thomas R. Zentall ; Chapter 7: What Can Neuroeconomics Tell Us About Economics (and Vice Versa)? ; Mark Dean ; Commentary 7.1. Disciplining behavioral theories through brain-based models of decision-making ; Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo ; Commentary 7.2 On the benefits of studying mechanisms underlying behavior ; Andrew Sih, Andrew Bibian, Nick DiRienzo, XiuXiang Meng, Pierre-Oliver Montiglio and Kevin Ringelman ; Chapter 8. Behavioral Approaches to Decision Making ; Edmund Fantino and Stephanie Stolarz-Fantino ; Commentary 8.1 Can Choice Be Suboptimal? ; K. Geoffrey White ; Commentary 8.2 How Studying Animals Can Clarify the Basis of Human Decision Making ; Thomas Zentall ; Chapter 9. A behavioral ecology view of decision making: something old, something borrowed, something new ; Andrew Sih ; Commentary 9.1 Crossovers in Ecological and Economic Models of Decisions ; Jack Schieffer ; Commentary 9.2 The Scientific Perspective and the Potential Emergence of a General Theory of Decision Making ; David F. Westneat ; Chapter 10. Using evolutionary thinking to cut across disciplines: the example of the argumentative theory of reasoning ; Hugo Mercier ; Commentary 10.1 Evolution and Development ; David Moshman ; Commentary 10.2 The Effectiveness of Classical Reasoning and the Provenance of Reasoning by Argumentation ; Philip H. Crowley ; Commentary 10.3 A new link in the Unification of the Sciences of Cognition ; Alain Trognon and Martine Batt ; Commentary 10.4: The Evolution of Argument: A Commentary on Mercier ; David S. Chester, Richard S. Pond, Jr., and C. Nathan DeWall ; Chapter 11. Poor Decisions About Security ; Bruce Schneier and Deric Miller ; Commentary 11.1: Poor Decisions about Security ; Helen Pushkarskaya and Ifat Levy ; Commentary 11.2: Human irrationality as a contributor financial and economic insecurity: Implications for policy-makers ; Denis Hilton and Caroline Attia ; Chapter 12. Increasing the Accuracy of Criminal Justice Decision-Making ; Sarah A. Crowley and Peter J. Neufeld ; Commentary 12.1. Roots of Wrongful Convictions ; Brandon L. Garrett ; Commentary 12.2. Driving forces for change ; Rebecca E. Bucht ; Chapter 13. Forensic Judgment and Decision-Making ; Peter A. F. Fraser-Mackenzie, Rebecca E. Bucht, & Itiel E. Dror ; Commentary 13.1 The Awkward Marriage of Criminal Justice and Science ; Sarah Crowley ; Commentary 13.2 In the Eye of the Beholder ; Thomas R. Zentall ; Chapter 14. Computational Decision Support: Regret-based Models for Optimization and Preference Elicitation ; Craig Boutilier ; Commentary 14.1. Group Decision Making on Combinatorial Domains ; Jerome Lang ; Commentary 14.2. Putting Preferences into Computational Context ; Judy Goldsmith ; Commentary 14.3. Bottlenecks and Regret ; Vincent Conitzer and Lirong Xia ; Chapter 15. Improving public policy decisions in creating institutions and markets to transfer natural disaster risk in developing countries ; Jerry R. Skees and Grant Cavanaugh ; Commentary 15.1 Decision Making About Real Needs of Actual People ; Helen Pushkarskya ; Commentary 15.2 Designing Mechanisms to Overcome Market and Behavioral Failures ; Jack Schieffer ; Chapter 16. What the comparative approach to decision making has to offer ; Philip H. Crowley and Thomas R. Zentall